Whicker: For some Bruins, Tulsa is a bad word

SAN DIEGO – For the UCLA fan, of a certain age, the word “Tulsa” is a brick through the window at midnight.

That fan shuddered, involuntarily, on Sunday when the NCAA Tournament bracket appeared.

There was UCLA on one line, Tulsa on the other.

Even, 20 years later, it sounds like Dunkirk.

A couple of minutes after the news came down, Ed O’Bannon texted Tyus Edney: “God must have a sense of humor.”

It all stems back to 1994, when three members of this UCLA rotation weren’t even born.

UCLA came to Oklahoma City in 1994 with nose in the air and eyes looking way ahead.

Waiting was a Tulsa team coached by Tubby Smith, full of runners and shooters and the sweet rage of the disrespected.

The Golden Hurricane led the Bruins 10-0 in the first 140 seconds. That was enough to get the unaffiliated fans in line with the Tulsa crowd. Stuck in a hole, the catatonic Bruins did nothing but dig. At one point Tulsa led, 46-17, and Coach Jim Harrick looked as if he’d seen a ghost with a checkbook in his hand.

Edney was there, although back spasms kept him from doing much. Shea Seals was there, too. He is now on the Tulsa staff, just as Edney is on UCLA’s.

“We were fired up,” Seals said. “Especially after they started giving us all that bulletin-board material.”

As you might recall, Ed O’Bannon was asked beforehand if he knew anything about Tulsa. “I don’t even know what state they’re in,” he said. The Internet had not cranked up yet, but no matter. The word got to Tulsa quickly enough.

“That was like a slap in the face,” Seals said. “A lot of us had grown up in Oklahoma. We knew they weren’t taking us seriously. It’s the tournament, you know. Any little thing can set you off.”

The halftime score was 63-38. Gary Collier was on his way to a 34-point night. Alvin “Pooh” Williamson, emboldened by Edney’s discomfort, was riddling the UCLA defense with his generalship.

It was the end of a season that began with 14 consecutive victories and crested with a No. 1 ranking. The fact that UCLA lost seven of its final 14 doubled the heat on Harrick, who at that point had not gone to a Final Four.

“It was just a nightmare game,” Edney said. “I had those spasms and I couldn’t do much. I really don’t think we overlooked them. I just didn’t think they were as good as they were. They wound up going to the final 16 that year.

“They were new to us and we were just focused on ourselves. That’s the thing about the tournament. You never know how you’re going to match up with somebody. They punched us first and we couldn’t recover from it in time.”

Tulsa’s next victory was even sweeter, 82-80 over Oklahoma State. The Hurricane would go to six NCAAs in the next nine years and win at least one game in five of them.

And Tulsa began the 1996-97 season with a first-round NIT victory in Pauley Pavilion. That was the first game coached by Steve Lavin.

Friday night, with Danny Manning coaching, is Tulsa’s first tournament game in 11 years.

"That win (in 1994) jump-started our tradition," Seals said. "It was the signature win that established us as a solid-mid-major program."

A year later Smith became Georgia’s coach and eventually found his way to Kentucky, where he won the 1998 NCAA championship.

But the story also ended happily for UCLA.

“That was a long plane ride home,” Edney said. “You always have this hunger to play another game. We came out next year and were a lot more focused.”

O’Bannon and his girlfriend Rosa took a long, solemn walk in Manhattan Beach while Arkansas was beating Duke for the championship. They looked into the windows of the houses, at the TVs and the basketball going on without him.

“We’re playing in that game next year,” O’Bannon told Rosa.

That image carried over to the first day of practice, and O’Bannon’s game face never softened, to the point that Lavin, then an assistant, called him “Daddy Lion.”

“We thought you hated us,” freshman Toby Bailey told him later.

Bailey and J.R. Henderson, untouched by Tulsa, got right in step. In April of ’95, Shea Seals and everyone else saw UCLA win the NCAA championship over Arkansas – ironically, with Edney on the bench with a bad wrist, replaced by Cameron Dollar.

And so Tulsa went from a dead end to a starting point.

It does not keep the UCLA fan, of a certain age, from locking the doors.